Sunday, 22 June 2014

How To Pick Your Life Partner - Partner Is Important and Whole Life

How To Pick Your Life Partner
So
you’ve got more ideas about how to pick your life partner in Part 1.
Here Wait But Why explores more on what makes a happy life partnership.
Often,
the key to succeeding at something big is to break it into its tiniest
pieces and focus on how to succeed at just one piece.
When we
examined procrastination, we talked about how a great achievement is
just what a long series of unremarkable tasks looks like from far away.
In the pixel post, we looked at a human life up close and saw that it
was just an ordinary Wednesday, again and again and again—and that
achieving life happiness was all about learning to be happy on a routine
weekday.
I think the same idea applies to marriage.
From
afar, a great marriage is a sweeping love story, like a marriage in a
book or a movie. And that’s a nice, poetic way to look at a marriage as a
whole.
But human happiness doesn’t function in sweeping strokes,
because we don’t live in broad summations—we’re stuck in the tiny
unglamorous folds of the fabric of life, and that’s where our happiness
is determined.
So if we want to find a happy marriage, we need to
think small—we need to look at marriage up close and see that it’s built
not out of anything poetic, but out of 20,000 mundane Wednesdays.
Marriage
isn’t the honeymoon in Thailand—it’s day four of vacation #56 that you
take together. Marriage is not celebrating the closing of the deal on
the first house—it’s having dinner in that house for the 4,386th time.
And it’s certainly not Valentine’s Day.
Marriage is Forgettable Wednesday. Together.
So
I’ll leave the butterflies and the kisses in the rain and the
twice-a-day sex to you—you’ll work that part out I’m sure—and spend this
post trying to figure out the best way to make Forgettable Wednesday as
happy as possible.
To endure 20,000 days with another human being and do so happily, there are three key ingredients necessary:1. An Epic Friendship
I enjoy spending time with most of my friends—that’s why they’re my
friends. But with certain friends, the time is so high-quality, so
interesting, and so fun that they pass the Traffic Test.
The
Traffic Test is passed when I’m finishing up a hangout with someone and
one of us is driving the other back home or back to their car, and I
find myself rooting for traffic. That’s how much I’m enjoying the time
with them.
Passing the Traffic Test says a lot. It means I’m lost
in the interaction, invigorated by it, and that I’m the complete
opposite of bored.
To me, almost nothing is more critical in
choosing a life partner than finding someone who passes the Traffic
Test. When there are people in your life who do pass the Traffic Test,
what a whopping shame it would be to spend 95% of the rest of your life
with someone who doesn’t.A Traffic Test-passing friendship entails:
A great sense of humor click. No one wants to spend 50 years fake laughing.
Fun. And the ability to extract fun out of unfun situations—airport
delays, long drives, errands. Not surprisingly, studies suggest that the
amount of fun a couple has is a strong predictor for their future.
A
respect for each other’s brains and way of thinking. A life partner
doubles as a career/life therapist, and if you don’t respect the way
someone thinks, you’re not going to want to tell them your thoughts on
work each day, or on anything else interesting that pops into your head,
because you won’t really care that much what they have to say about it.
A decent number of common interests, activities, and
people-preferences. Otherwise a lot of what makes you ‘you’ will
inevitably become a much smaller part of your life, and you and your
life partner will struggle to find enjoyable ways to spend a free
Saturday together.
A friendship that passes the Traffic Test gets
better and better with time, and it has endless room to deepen and grow
ever-richer.2. A Feeling of Home
If someone
told you you had to sit in a chair for 12 straight hours without moving,
aside from wondering why the hell they were making you do this, your
first thought would be, “I better get in the most comfortable possible
position”—because you’d know that even the slightest bit of discomfort
would grow to pain and eventually, torture. When you have to do
something for a long, long time, it’s best if it’s supremely
comfortable.
When it comes to marriage, a perpetual “discomfort”
between you and your partner can be a permanent source of unhappiness,
especially as it magnifies over time, much like your torturous situation
in the chair. Feeling “at home” means feeling safe, cozy, natural, and
utterly yourself, and in order to have this feeling with a partner, a
few things need to be in place:
Trust and security. Secrets are
poison to a relationship, because they form an invisible wall inside the
relationship, leaving both people somewhat alone in the world—and
besides, who wants to spend 50 years lying or worrying about hiding
something? And on the other side of secrets will often be suspicion, a
concept that directly clashes with the concept of home. This is why
having an affair during an otherwise good marriage is one of the most
self-defeating and short-sighted things someone could ever do.
Natural
chemistry. Interacting should be easy and natural, energy levels should
be in the same vicinity, and you should feel on the same “wavelength”
in general. When I’m with someone on a very different wavelength than I
am, it doesn’t take long before the interaction becomes exhausting.
Acceptance
of human flaws. You’re flawed. Like, really flawed. And so is your
current or future life-partner. Being flawed is part of the definition
of being a human. And one of the worst fates would be to spend most of
your life being criticized for your flaws and reprimanded for continuing
to have them. This isn’t to say people shouldn’t work on
self-improvement, but when it comes to a life partnership, the healthy
attitude is, “Every person comes with a set of flaws, these are my
partner’s, and they’re part of the package I knowingly chose to spend my
life with.”
A generally positive vibe. Remember, this is the vibe
you’re a part of now, forever. It’s not really acceptable for it to be a
negative one, nor is it sustainable. Relationship scientist John
Gottman has found that “couples with a ratio of fewer than five positive
interactions for every negative one are destined for divorce.”3. A Determination to be Good at Marriage
Relationships are hard. Expecting a strong relationship without
treating it like a rigorous part-time job is like expecting to have a
great career without putting in any effort. In a time when humans in
most parts of the world can enjoy freedom and carve their own path in
life, it usually doesn’t sit that well to suddenly become half of
something and compromise on a bunch of things you grew up being selfish
about.So what skills does someone need to learn to be good at marriage?
Communication.
Communication being on this list is as silly as “oxygen” being on a
list of items you need to stay healthy. And yet, poor communication is
the downfall of a huge number of couples—in fact, in a study on
divorcees, communication style was the top thing they said they’d change
for their next relationship. Communication is hard to do well
consistently—successful couples often need to create pre-planned systems
or even partake in couples’ therapy to make sure it happens.
Maintaining equality. Relationships can slip into an unequal power
dynamic pretty quickly. When one person’s mood always dictates the mood
in the room, when one person’s needs or opinion consistently prevail
over the other’s, when one person can treat the other in a way they’d
never stand for being treated themselves—you’ve got a problem.
Fighting well. Fighting is inevitable. But there are good and bad ways
to fight. When a couple is good at fighting, they defuse tension,
approach things with humor, and genuinely listen to the other side,
while avoiding getting nasty, personal or defensive. They also fight
less often than a bad couple. According to John Gottman, 69% of a
typical couple’s fights are perpetual, based on core differences, and
cannot be resolved—and a skilled couple understands this and refrains
from engaging in these brawls again and again.9
In searching for
your life partner or assessing your current life partnership, it’s
important to remember that every relationship is flawed and you probably
won’t end up in something that gets an A in every one of the above
items and bullet points—but you should hope to do pretty well on most of
them, since each one plays a large part in your lifelong happiness.
And
since this is a daunting list to try to achieve in a life partnership,
you probably don’t want to make things even harder than they need to be
by insisting upon too many other checkboxes—most of which will not have a
large effect on your happiness during dinner #4,386 of your marriage.
It would be nice if he played the guitar, but take it off the list of
must-haves.
I hope Valentine’s Day was good for you this year,
whatever you did for it. Just remember that Forgettable Wednesday is a
much more important day.